Lessons Learned from a Research Saga

A team of researchers led by the author developed, designed, conducted, and reported a large-scale content analysis of the structural features of television. The project was unusually ambitious and, by necessity, creative. The chapter describes some of the key decisions and challenges the team faced along the way and the unexpected afterlife of the original project. The author concludes with advice for content analysis and for other researchers based on lessons learned from the experience. Keywords: Content analysis; intercoder reliability; structural features; television; quantitative; sampling; coding scheme